Despite the Big East's dominance of the Top 25 polls, the bottom teams in the 16-school conference hurt the league's overall score, which is based on a combination of computer rankings and poll results.

Here is what ESPN says about the Big East:

The Big East accrues the highest human bonus based largely on being the only conference with three schools in the AP and coaches top 10. Unfortunately, it also has some dead weight toward the bottom with seven teams outside the top 100 on average computer ranking, which hurts it with the computers.

ESPN ranks the conferences giving every school a rating based on the average of four computer ranking systems -- Massey, Pomeroy, Sagarin and RPI. It then takes the ratings for every schools in a conference, adds them up and divides by the number of teams in the conference to get an overall conference score. Bonuses are then awarded based on the number of teams and rankings in the AP and coaches' Top 25 polls.